If you like Basecamp, you’ll love Trigger.
We don’t just offer to-do lists and simple project management.
We offer a comprehensive project management and time tracking solution that helps you stop overservicing clients, so you can run a more profitable business. Compare for yourself!

Feature

Trigger

Basecamp

Built-in time tracking

Built-in management reporting (including CSVs)

Built-in invoicing

Xero integration

Slack integration

Internal group chat instead

Tasks list view (account, company and/or project)

Advanced task management and sorting

Kanban boards

Ability to let clients in to collaborate (and ability to choose if a message is public or private)

Only with US$79/month plan or US$3000/month enterprise plan

Optional ability to show clients their billable info, target hours and logged hours

Calendar (showing project and task due dates)

Team schedule

Milestones (to-do lists)

Trigger v Basecamp in more detail

1. Built-in time tracking (including target hours vs logged hours)

A time tracking solution can genuinely mean the difference between losing money, breaking even or making a profit. Which means that if you’re a savvy business manager, tracking your team’s time can be critical for the success of your service-based business, where you need to know, for sure, how long it takes to complete tasks.

Unlike Basecamp, you do not need to pay a third party provider for time tracking in Trigger. Our built-in time tracking comes at no extra cost and it can help you stop overservicing clients and start increasing your business’ profitability.

The ability to see target hours versus logged hours (and not just a dummy bucket of tracked time) is also a godsend to project managers who need to keep projects on time, on track and on budget.

Trigger has built-in invoicing functionality. Surprisingly, Basecamp does not, not even on their integrations page. This means if you’re using Basecamp and wanting to bill real clients, you’ll likely need to pay for an additional invoicing app.

4. Xero integration

Much to the delight of our small and medium sized business clients, Trigger syncs smoothly to the popular accounting application, Xero.

This means that if you combine Xero and Trigger, you never need to double-handle an invoice again!

Basecamp offers a group chat function, but it’s nowhere near as powerful as what Slack offers, so that’s why, here at Trigger, we integrated with Slack rather than spending money on building a new group chat platform. (For most small and medium sized businesses, Slack can be free, depending on usage.)

To see our full list of Trigger integrations (including an integration with Basecamp), click here.

6. Tasks list view (all of account, company or project)

Trigger offers a comprehensive tasks list view which can show every task in your account and/or just the tasks for one company or project. This is different from Basecamp, which focusses on a per-project view, rather than per-project and per-tasks views.

7. Advanced task management, ordering and sorting

Trigger was built from day one as a full project management system. This means that from day one, we thought about the need for different businesses to filter and sort tasks in different ways.

Trigger currently allows you to sort by:

By priority

By due date

By task number

By task name

By tag

By assignee

By author

By status

By company name

By project name

By total hours logged

8. Kanban boards

Kanban boards are Trello-like card views, where you can move the cards around and get a more visual view of your projects. Trigger offers a Kanban board option, Basecamp does not.

But unlike competitors such as Asana, Trigger doesn’t marry you to one view of the other. Trigger allows you the ability to easily switch between a Tasks list view and a Kanban board view, at any point in time.

9. Ability to let clients in to collaborate (and ability to choose if a message is public or private)

Trigger allows you to invite clients in to collaborate. (Clients don’t always have to log in to Trigger. They are welcome to reply to email notifications and their responses will feed directly into the relevant Trigger task, to keep all the conversations in one place.)

Trigger also allows you private status updates, so you can keep your internal conversations private and only make public the conversations you’re happy for your clients to see and collaborate on.

Basecamp only offers this in their “Clientside” feature, which is for subscribers on the US$79/month plan and the US$3000/month enterprise plans.

Trigger offers the optional ability to show clients their billable information (not your internal cost information), target hours and logged hours. Basecamp does not. So, if you’re a proponent of total client transparency, this Trigger feature might be perfect for you.

11. Calendar

Basecamp has a “Schedule” view which shows due dates (which is similar to Trigger’s “Calendar” view), but Basecamp’s Schedule is only inside each project itself, it does not show an all-of-account (or all-per-person) summary of due dates, for easier reference.

12. Team schedule

Trigger offers an awesome team schedule for team organisation and capacity planning. Basecamp does not.

13. Milestone (to-do lists)

Both Trigger and Basecamp offer milestone (to-do) lists within the projects themselves. These are super-handy for team members who like to follow a list to get things done.

But wait, there’s more...

Trigger is a small team dedicated to your success. We’re incredibly responsive and can adapt quickly to customer requests for features and improvements. So if you have an awesome idea about how we can be even better than Basecamp and the big guys, we’d love to hear from you here.

Coming to Trigger from Basecamp?

Trigger integrates with Basecamp, so that if you connect the two, you can easily:

Import Basecamp Todolists

Import Basecamp Todos

Import Basecamp Comments

Associated creators and assignees are retrieved and stored into one Trigger Company called "Basecamp Import"